Not getting hired, promoted, asked to speak, invited to participate? Not getting read, funded, selected, noticed? You’re not being recognized.

Here’s how you can change that.

We show you how to overcome professional obscurity with digital literacy. Announcing: SUM-it UP at Udemy, the online education platform.

GlobalNiche.net uses a holistic, dual approach in our always-on SUM-it UP program at Udemy. We focus on the internal (personal discovery, development and empowerment) and the external (web presence, digital literacy and professional expression). We show you how to marry who you are and where you want to go with the tools available to express yourself while building a path to opportunities you want.

Related posts:

1. Kate England finds her global niche
2. Susannah Conway finds her global niche
3. She said, she said: quotables of expat+HAREM’s founder
4. The expat divide: digital world citizens bridge an opportunity gap
5. Social media as self actualization: how has it launched you?
6. Publishing and the digital world citizen
7. My global niche: an interview with Today’s Zaman newspaper
8. expat+HAREM becomes an archive

Have you tried mapping the complexity and richness of your life (and career) with an overlapping Venn diagram?

Here’s what turned up when we did one for GlobalNiche — you can see all the relationships of our personal and professional influences and communities as we operate at the intersection of content, culture, and identity.

There’s power in your diversity, how you combine your worlds, and the hybrid result! If you’ve attempted a Venn of some part of your life, you’re invited to share it on the GlobalNiche Facebook page here.

Find out how to become the agent of your own life. Get on our list today.

FEEDBURNER READERS — WE’RE SWITCHING TO AN EMAIL DELIVERY SYSTEM, THIS FEED IS ENDING: If you’re reading this through Feedburner — you won’t be getting many more expat+HAREM messages…we don’t want to lose you in the evolution to GlobalNiche.net so please swing by to join our list here

By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

Do you ever feel suspended between multiple worlds — challenged in your pursuits and interests by culture, geography, language or time zone? Welcome to the club.

The GlobalNiche club, that is. Here we take advantage of our situation mismatches.

In fact, after fourteen years of expatriatism and through my cultural identity work as a writer/producer I’ve come to see this psychic limbo state about who we are and where we belong — familiar to people with transglobal lives and culturally hybrid lifestyles — as our secret weapon.

To start at the beginning, we’re all born global citizens even if that knowledge gets trained out of us. As we mature, a global identity seems nebulous, and ungrounded. Better to bond with the more concrete: family, culture, nation. Our schoolmates, colleagues, neighbors.

There’s a problem with concrete, though. It cracks over time and in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

I’d even venture to say that ‘our people’ today are not who they used to be. We’re unbounded by the communities in our physical midst. Now we can find inspiring new kinship in interest and outlook.

Expats and international types have more reasons than most to find a way to operate independently of where we happen to be physically.

With today’s economic uncertainties no matter who or where we are, we all have to embrace an enterprising view of ourselves — a way to operate unlimited by the options directly surrounding us.

With recent advances in virtual technologies like mobile devices and the social web, we have tools at our disposal to help us live a globally unbounded life.

Now we don’t have to be a tech expert or social media guru to build a micro-yet-global base of operations with a professional web platform and virtual network for continuing education, professional development, and a close-knit but world-flung set of friends. We can be digital world citizens and achieve a cutting-edge state of being — that is, what I call ‘psychic location independence’.

I coined the concept of a global niche — defined as a ‘psychic solution to your global identity crisis’– at expat+HAREM, the online community of global citizens, identity adventurers and intentional travelers I founded in 2009. The group blog was inspired by the global community that gathered around Tales from the Expat Harem, an anthology by foreign women about their lives in modern Turkey that I coedited in 2005 with fellow Istanbul resident Jennifer Gokmen.

Expatharem.com was also informed by the idea of an ‘expat harem’ itself, where all the writers in the book and the readers drawn to them are cultural peers in a virtual realm.

Along with my partner Tara Agacayak, a creative enterprise consultant from Silicon Valley in America who’s spent the past 10 years in Turkey, this fall I launched a new work-life initiative at GlobalNiche.net.

In this hands-on venture we’ll be practicing creative self enterprise for the global soul, based on the philosophies evolved from 175 incisive neoculture discussions and 2800 comments archived at the expat+HAREM site.

Besides the expat+HAREM revelations, we’re also applying life-work innovations Tara and I have been exploring in the past few years in our professional communities of creative entrepreneurs and social media proponents. Combining our expat and entrepreneurship experiences has led us to the conclusion that networked reality is the most important independent survival skill of international people.

If you’re interested to receive email about the life-work journeys of mobile progressives and cultural creatives in situation mismatches, please sign up at GlobalNiche.net

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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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Related posts:

1. expat+HAREM becomes an archive

FEEDBURNER READERS: WE DON’T WANT TO LOSE YOU! This expat+HAREM delivery service is ending. Join the GlobalNiche.net list to evolve with us  It only takes a minute to join.

By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

Take a plunge into metaphor with us as we explore the meaning behind a graphic muse you’ll recognize from Dialogue2010 Mapping the Hybrid Life podcast and the Hybrid Ambassadors blog-ring.

At GlobalNiche.net we love this image – part photograph, part 2nd generation photocopy, and part Photoshop — a whimsical pioneer woman peering out from the center of her own personal compass point. We’ve incorporated her into the logo for our new work-life initiative, and below we discover exactly how she embodies creative enterprise for the global soul.

(You can see this story of how I made our mystery woman in my isolated Kuala Lumpur office in 1998, where she comes from, what she’s survived — and also, circumstantially, why she’s so well-coiffed – in the proper Tweet-and-commentary format at Storify.com)

• I spotted this whimsical woman on a fading coiffeur signboard in Sarawak, Borneo

Photography is a now-not-so-secret love of mine, and it was a saving grace of my first long-term expat stint in Southeast Asia. Seeing everything with a photographer’s eye made my surroundings endlessly fascinating and ripe with opportunity, no matter what else was happening or how I was feeling. It was also a key to orienting myself, following leads, making connections between the past and the present cultures.

The quickly-disappearing antique commercial signboards of the Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore) were a particular favorite of mine. You can imagine when I landed in the East Malaysia state of Sarawak I went straight to the old town to see the remnants of what establishments had once flourished there.

Although the inevitable lag of fashion around the world might be at work here, from her hairstyle I guess the sign went up in the 1930s-40s.

• the compass superimposed over her eye (self-image, get it?) is from an around-the-world cruise line ad

…and with her eye on the world, the image represents her unique perspective.

• the round-the-globe ad was published during the Golden Age of Travel. I found it in the National Archives of Malaysia

I was an absolute microfiche *bandit* at the National Archive….here you can see some of the Straits Settlements newspaper gossip items and police blotters I captured. Hilarious, tragic, telling stuff no matter what the subject (whether it was Somerset Maugham’s buttoned-down planters going nuts/running amok, or infectious diseases being passed around by the Chinese laundry services, or opium dens being fined for admitting ladies, the place was off-the-hook).

The steamer-trunks-and-servants Golden Age of travel was also an interest piqued by the region, and I explored it for a web venture Flaming East.

• in land of White Rajas (Conrad’s early heartofdarkness?), she seemed 1) out of place 2) possibly mistress of her domain

• The White Rajahs were a dynasty of Brits who ruled Sarawak for about a hundred years during the mid-19th-20th century.

Joseph Conrad, author of the novel Heart of Darkness, had earlier written Lord Jim, which may have been based in part on the pirate-filled sea experiences of the first White Rajah James Brooke.

To that setting of personal, mini-empire building, add the coiffed nature of this woman and you get someone who seems like she’s holding it together somehow. She’s managing to take care of herself.

At GlobalNiche.net we’re not all about personal grooming — nor are we conquering anything except perhaps our situations (setting up our own private rajs?).

…but this specific and historical background was swirling around the image of the coiffed lady when I snapped it as a displaced Western woman in the tropics myself. To me, the context was captured along with the image.

Being yourself *and* at home in a place very different than what you’ve known or been prepared for — out of place, and mistress of our domain — that’s the GlobalNiche combo!

• GlobalNiche’s muse is a woman in the wild following her personal compass where ever around the world it might take her

And in conclusion…just as the Golden Age of Travel revolutionized the possibilities of exploring the world with confidence

at GlobalNiche.net we’re operating globally with the ease of digital nomadism and with the precision of a unique sense of who we are

…suddenly our incidental heroine is thoroughly modern, and appropriate for today’s unbounded age.

• our muse is a #pioneer centered by her personal compass in an age when traveling with speed/style/grace is perfected

Tell us what you see in the wild-but-coiffed woman of Borneo. What name would you give her? (I think we’re going to need one!)

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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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FEEDBURNER READERS: If you’re reading this through Feedburner — you won’t be getting many more expat+HAREM messages…we don’t want to lose you in the evolution to GlobalNiche.net so please swing by to join our list here

By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

Hello expat+HAREM friends! Big news in the dead of summer (or is it winter? We have Southern Hemispherean readers too.)

expat+HAREM is now an archive. After two magical years, we’ve amassed 175 neoculture discussions and 2,800 insightful, funny, poignant comments from globalists, culturati and hybrid lifestylers like you. Can you believe it? Please accept a huge round of thanks: to our generous guest posters, our lively blog participants, our loyal audience.

As expat+HAREM’s founder, I recognize the culture and identity issues we’ve tackled at expat+HAREM are evergreen. So I’ll be keeping them live and available for you here at expatharem.com during my transition to GlobalNiche.net.

By now you probably have a clue what GlobalNiche.net is going to be. Here’s more.

This hands-on venture is my new life-work initiative to put into practice expat+HAREM theories. I’m calling what we’ll be practicing “creative self enterprise for the global soul.”

Global Niche is a practical evolution for expat+HAREM and I hope you feel the next step on this journey holds relevance to the life you lead, too.

We’ve identified ourselves and found resonance with each other. Common ground, ways to talk about our lives and experiences with meaning and precision. Now how do we transform?

How do we do whatever we’ve somehow felt geographically or culturally disadvantaged to fully do? 

It’s time for action.

I’ll be partnering with creative enterprise consultant Tara Agacayak to explore with you (and other mobile progressives, cultural creatives, indie pros and displaced people of all kinds) exactly how to build a micro-yet-global base of operation — a global niche. I’ll also be a guinea pig and sharing my own global microbrand-building results and revelations along the way [eek!]

I hope you’ll  choose to stick with us for this exciting evolution. Our approach is going to be email blogging — that means we’ll be contacting you through email, not at a blog on the open web. The best way to stay in touch is to join the Global Niche list. If you’re on the expat+HAREM mailing list already, you’re covered.

Thanks for your time and your community, I cherish it.

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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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Related posts:

1. Get creative about your place in the world: how to operate on a micro-yet-global level with a global niche

By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

“Whoever gets a D in math has to sit in back.” That’s how I’d call shotgun when it was time to squeeze our teenage bodies into the family’s tiny Honda.

My younger sister Monika didn’t appeal to my mother at the wheel. This cruel, impromptu rule was imposed by a straight-A sibling, and grades were everything in our California household. That was the family culture.

Eventually these two West Coasters overcame their sibling rivalry — oddly enough, in a town of hippies, yippies and Beatniks — by channeling Continental ladies of leisure.

To find out how, read the rest of my essay “Sibling Rivalry” at AOL’s MyDaily/HUFFPOST WOMEN.

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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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Related posts:

1. Psychic location independence: optimizing life in spite of where you are

By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

Rounding up zillions of links resonant to our community that cross my screen…this week we’re looking at the latest labels for who we are, what we do and how we live.

These are the kind of things I share *daily* on my Twitter feed — follow me or get the feed sent directly to your feed reader.

• Are you a “wanderlista” — a person who embraces “the art of travel through culture and style”? New York lifestyle publicist and designer Andria Mitsakos takes us around the world on her Tumblr blog, and tells us how she styles her life.

• Are you proud to be a nomad, like this copyeditor in Buenos Aires at Nomadtopia, who here reclaims the nomad label for its positives? Nomads aren’t shiftless and irresponsible, they’re flexible and pursue opportunity!

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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

American reporter in Turkey Brooks Emerson asked me about the foreign edge, and the challenges of finding my niche in Turkey for his series on expat success stories in national English-language newspaper Today’s Zaman.

In the far-ranging interview, Emerson asks me what the initial impetus for my success as an expat was, and how I’ve evolved.

No surprise to those who know me, foreign language adoption has not played much of a role — once I realized that taking business meetings and doing live television interviews in Turkish literally was rendering me mute! But mentoring in all realms of my personal and professional life has been a “secret weapon” in the creative entrepreneurship of self that I aim to practice.

Emerson asks me how the environment affects the outcome of an expat’s endeavors. I tell him how sense of place can inspire a sense of self.

“Anastasia says that she has always been attracted to places with an amalgamation of people and cultures. However, the biggest pull is “the idea of crossroads … like Rome, where [she] studied in college … and now here on the Bosporus,” where she senses a positive energy and vibration for self-discovery and reinvention.

“Anastasia believes that working and living abroad is an excellent way to discover new self-potential.“

Read Emerson’s entire July 2011 interview “The global niche of Anastasia Ashman” online.

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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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